Is the US Over-Regulated

I never understood the problem with US regulations before, until they were described in the British Economist: Democrats want to regulate business, so that laissez-faire capitalism doesn't run so wild that it destroys society--something it almost did in 2007-8. Republicans want to regulate behavior, i.e. criminal behavior of the lower classes and minorities, and "free business from regulation." Interestingly, the center-right Economist, sees Democrats' priorities as favorably as Republicans,' but damns both--for the way Americans write their laws and consequent regulations.

One example is the Dodd-Frank bill, which is intended to regulate the finance industry to prevent a replay of the collapse in 2008 that led to the Great Recession. It attempts to cover every eventuality, and every kind of financial practice in excruciating detail--it's nearly 900 pages--before most of the actual regulations are written to implement the law. That one was a Democratic monstrosity, but Republicans have done the same kind of thing regulating abortions, for example: bills, which become laws, have become interminably long, and complex.

It may be that the complexity of American regulatory law reflects the growing complexity of our society, but it may also be that laws are so incredibly complex, because our legal system has become so--Americans are exceptionally litigious.

But there may be another reason. In this rigidifying society, Americans have to protect their status, especially their professional status. Even back in the Dark Ages of the 1970's, when I was an academic, professional jargon was necessary to prove your professional standing. I was criticized for writing scholarly articles in plain English! I knew the same was true for my colleagues in other Social Sciences, the Sciences and especially the Humanities.

Not until I had to deal with things like owning property and putting roads across streams, did I realize that government bureaucracies do the same things. I've glimpsed enough to know that corporate bureaucracies are like this, too. There are special ways of speaking or writing that are required for you to fit in. It's called protecting your ass, and everyone else's: your little fiefdom. This is becoming increasingly important as class mobility declines. People, with fewer prospects of advancement, hunker down and protect what they have.

Lawyers have some of the most arcane jargon and grammatical construction of any of the professions. Yet, it's primarily lawyers-turned-politicians who write our laws, and lawyers-turned-bureaucrats who vet the regulations written by legally trained civil servants.

Is it any wonder that the elaboration of laws, their sheer complexity, their piling on laws upon laws to regulate what one simple ordinance might do, has found its greatest flowering in the US? Judicial or managerial judgement is not to be trusted.

Sharpening class lines, and the brittleness that engenders, became pronounced in Fifth Century Rome: the US seems to be following the same trajectory. Moves to simplify laws and regulations are much needed, but probably won't happen: special interests protect themselves.